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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • I get why in this momement where Ukraine appears to be dependent on NATO support, and where it seems like NATO is required to counterbalence Russia, why people would support the existence of it. But, it is absolutely a tool of US global hegemonic power. The US has committed some incredibly horrific acts to secure its position as sole global super power and NATO as a tool to develop and maintain that power has been used to that end, and will continue to be used in that way. We should not confuse tools of imperial power projection to be a good thing.





  • I really wish people would look at it in this lens more. I think this is a big part of why we’re see this same issue in many developed countries. Like, yes. Xenophobia and racism is a part of it, but the other, more actionable part of it is that all of our viable political options have turned into technocrats who have used their political and economic expertise to fatten the richest people, and largest, most profitable industries at the expense of the poor for decades. This reality has bred resentment, distrust, and disinterest in politics, especially of political moderates and “status quo” politicians. All major left-wing opposition has been suppressed, or neutered, and as a result the only truly “oppositional” seeming politics come from far right nut jobs and they end up being the release valve for the political frustration. People can only hear “the economy is doing great”, while watching their children struggle to afford even a modest standard of living (by the standards we’ve come to expect) for so long before they become desperate for a significant change.




  • PumpkinSkink@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneRule
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    7 months ago

    I think the thing to keep in mind here is that those midrise mixed use buildings are housing, and can help the housing supply issue. The issue with them is often that wealthier neighborhoods and suburbs resist them so much that they end up being new expensive housing in the areas that were already doing the heavy lifting housing supply-wise.

    Near where I live there is an estimated housing supply deficit of literally several hundred thousand units. My city, a medium city in the Metropolitan area of a big city, has built more than 50 of these buildings in the last decade, but wealthier suburbs a little farther out have gone to absurd lengths to prevent more than one or two token multi-family units from being built in them. The metro area cities, who’s inhabitants feel the rise in housing price most sharply, cannot possibly build hundreds of thousands of units, there needs to also be significant building in suburban areas nearby if we want to hit that number and move the needle on housing.

    tldr: Those housing units are fine, we just need to get wealthier less densely developed suburbs to build them too. Oh and build a fucking train station there while you’re at it.




  • The fact is, however, that they impinge— as they always have— on the Arab residents of the territories, and then they have a distinct cutting edge to them. Both in theory and in practice their effectiveness lies in how they Judaize territory coterminously with de-Arabizing it.     There is privileged evidence of this fact, I think, in what Joseph Weitz had to say. From 1932 on, Weitz was the director of the Jewish National Land Fund; in 1965 his diaries and papers, My Diary, and Letters to the Children, were published in Israel. On December 19, 1940, he wrote:

    _“. . . after the Second World War the question of the land of Israel and the question of the Jews would be raised beyond the framework of “ development”; amongst ourselves. !t must be clear that there is no room for hoth peoples in this country. No ‘development’ will bring us closer to our aim. To be an independent people in this small country. If the Arabs leave the country, it will be broad and wide-open for us. And if the Arabs stay, the country will remain narrow and miserable.

    When the War is over and the English have won, and when the judges sit on the throne of Law, our people must bring theirpetitions and their claim before them; and the only solution is Eretz Israel, or at least Western Eretz Israel, without Arabs. There is no room for compromise on this point! The Zionist enterprise so far, in terms of preparing the ground and paving the way for the creation of the Hebrew State in the land of Israel, has been fine and good in its own time, and could do with ‘‘land-buying ’— but this will not bring about the State of Israel; that must come all at once, in the manner of a Salvation (this is the secret of the Messianic idea); and there is no way besides transferring the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, to transfer them all: except maybe for Bethlehem, Nazareth and Old Jerusalem, we must not leave a singlevillage, not a single tribe. And the transfer must be directed to Iraq, to Syria, and even to Transjordan. For that purpose we’ll find money, and a lot of money. And only with such a transfer will the country be able to absorb millions of our brothers, and the Jewish question shall be solved, once and for all. There is no other way out."_
    

    These are not only prophetic remarks about what was going to happen; they are also policy statements, in which Weitz spoke with the voice of the Zionist consensus. There were literally hundreds of such statements made by Zionists, beginning with Herzl. and when ‘salvation’ came it was with those ideas in mind that the conquest of Palestine, and the eviction of its Arabs, was carried out.

    ~The Question of Palestine, Edward Said

    There’s literally dozens of other quotes like this one from people instrumental in the founding of Israel in this chapter, and they are similarly genocidal. It was honestly pretty transparent what they were going for.